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In our new “how can we help you?” thread, a reader asks:
I’m starting to teach soon. Do people have recommendations for books or any other material on teaching methods, assignments, evaluations etc, that are useful for philosophy classes?
Does anyone have helpful tips or resources to share?
Set a limit to how much time you spend preparing. The law of diminishing returns is the key law of nature in teaching. More preparation does not always make a better lecture or classroom experience or learning experience. Also, get clear on what your goals are in teaching. If they are, for example, students learning, then do not focus on entertaining the students. If you focus on student learning then construct your assignments/tests accordingly (and your lectures as well). Good luck, though. Teaching can be a lot of fun and rewarding.
Unfortunately, the specifics of many pedagogy books is now outdated because of LLMs. But a good place to start might be *Teaching NonMajors* by Sven Arvidson. If you are teaching relatively small class sizes, “The Four-Sentence Paper” by Dennis Earl is great for philosophy. I have implemented it in a critical thinking course recently. The main result is that students are so clearly better at understanding how argumentative writing works.
So much of what you do in the classroom will be particular to your teaching style and your personality. Authenticity is the most valuable commodity in the classroom, and students can sniff out when you don’t really believe in your course. The best strategy, I think, is to recall your favorite philosophy classes and try to emulate that style.
I recommend three general policies for all courses:
1. No electronics unless the student has a good reason (and then accept basically any reason). Make sure to periodically remind students.
2. All assessment is in-class. (Grading papers where some might be LLM generated is one of the worst experiences of my life. I always feel so paranoid. Obviously this doesn’t work for asynchronous classes. I don’t think there’s a good solution.)
3. No busywork. It is disrespectful to your students’ already packed schedules.
If you use slides to present, spend an hour or two on YouTube looking for tutorials of making visually appealing slides. Don’t spend too much time, but if you can make sure that your slides are not full of texts, good; if they make visual sense to enhance the learning experience, better.
I second this comment and highly recommend this tutorial, titled “How to avoid death by PowerPoint”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iwpi1Lm6dFo
Watch the above YouTube video double speed, and you will have spent 10 mins of your time on something that will significantly improve your presentation skills.
Attention comes in about 20-minute chunks–maybe less in the cell phone era. Change topics/activities/modes about that often.
You don’t need to be talking the whole time, and probably shouldn’t be, but make sure group work is structured well enough (and is short enough) that conversations don’t go off topic into wasted time.
Getting good at running discussions is important. The folks at your Teaching and Learning Center will have suggestions on this and many other teaching topics.
The US Department of Education defines a credit hour as one 50-minute “contact hour” plus two hours of outside work. So a “three hour” or “three credit” class should require about nine hours per week of students, including class time. Structure assignments accordingly. A good target is 40 pages of reading per week and 20 pages of writing per semester.
Given that most of college learning takes place outside of class, you need to help students understand that fact and motivate them to want to do that work. A combination of sticks and carrots is probably best. Something like one-page reading responses due before each lecture with the possibility of being called on to read it aloud, and no credit if not present, might be a way to go.
You’ve got to pick your level of hard-ass-ness. As I’ve gotten deeper into my career, my desire to police students has dropped to zero and my empathy for students balancing life demands has gone way up. I have a “life happens” clause in my syllabus: One free one-week extension on any assignment, no questions asked, but give a reason in advance for a second request.
It is almost always a bad idea to make teaching strategies based on what you would have wanted or needed as an undergrad. We are among the very few who majored in Philosophy and went on to successfully complete graduate study–what we like or need as learners is not a good guide for understanding most students.
Your first teaching experience might be terrible. That’s okay. Do the best you can, and aim to keep improving. Like with stand-up comedy, part of getting proficient is just getting more “stage time.”
A strategy that I like and have used for years is that whenever I want to let them know something (especially those important ideas/arguments), I design activities to help students figure it out by themselves rather than telling them directly via lectures. I find that it is a better use of the class time and leads to better learning outcomes. And my course prep is mostly about different active learning activities rather than writing lecture notes or making slides.
The entirety of the books themselves are overkill, since the main important takeaways can be communicated relatively concisely, but for me the biggest alteration in my thinking about teaching has been a result of the stuff discussed in the books How People Learn and How Students Learn (they each cover the same stuff so you really only need one). Sadly neither are particularly philosophy focused (the latter one is very STEM focused, for instance) but whatever.
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